Recovery plan for endangered seablite

Garden

Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, March 21, 2010

Photo: Ron Sullivan

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Listed by the federal government as an endangered species, the sea-blight plant is historically known only from San Francisco Bay and Morro Bay. The last local population had vanished by the 1960s, a casualty of bay-fill development. Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local agencies are trying to bring it back. less

Listed by the federal government as an endangered species, the sea-blight plant is historically known only from San Francisco Bay and Morro Bay. The last local population had vanished by the 1960s, a casualty ... more

Photo: Ron Sullivan

Image 2 of 2

Listed by the federal government as an endangered species, the sea-blight plant is historically known only from San Francisco Bay and Morro Bay. The last local population had vanished by the 1960s, a casualty of bay-fill development. Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local agencies are trying to bring it back. less

Listed by the federal government as an endangered species, the sea-blight plant is historically known only from San Francisco Bay and Morro Bay. The last local population had vanished by the 1960s, a casualty ... more

Photo: Ron Sullivan

Recovery plan for endangered seablite

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Few non-botanists would give a California seablite plant a second glance. Suaeda californica is 2 feet tall, shrubby, with gray-green needlelike leaves and inconspicuous green flowers. What makes it special is its rarity. Listed by the federal government as an endangered species, it's historically known only from San Francisco Bay and Morro Bay. The last local population had vanished by the 1960s, a casualty of bay-fill development. Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local agencies are trying to bring it back, one of five focal species in an ambitious recovery plan for tidal-marsh plants and animals of the central California coast.

According to coastal ecologist Peter Baye, who has studied seablite and helped with its restoration, the plant may never have been locally common. Its preferred habitat was near the high-tide line on sheltered beaches on the landward side of salt marshes. Most herbarium specimens were collected along the East Bay shoreline, from Point San Pablo to San Leandro, although there are records from just south of Hunters Point and Visitacion Bay on the west side.

The beaches where it grew were composed of sand or "shell hash" - fragments of clam or oyster shells - with southern goldenrod, saltgrass, gumplant, California saltbush and spearscale.

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"At Morro Bay it likes to grow in decaying eelgrass, a source of nutrients," said Baye. "It needs a porous soft substrate that lets the roots breathe."

Like many of its relatives in the amaranth family, S. californica wants lots of nitrogen. One Morro Bay patch grows below a heron and cormorant rookery where the constant rain of guano has killed off all other plants, including eucalyptus.

Historical ecologist Robin Grossinger estimates that the bay used to have 33 linear miles of natural beaches, almost all now lost to development.

"The Central Bay had pocket marshes about 10 acres in size, a lot of them with beaches," he said. "They were definitely on the way out by World War II. Freeways like Interstate 80 in Berkeley obliterated the beaches. A lot of stuff got filled in the 1950s and '60s."

The construction of the Oakland Airport may have been the final blow for the California seablite. The last confirmed sighting was near San Leandro in 1958. Extensive searches by Baye and others failed to turn up survivors.

Meanwhile, the decline of the Morro Bay plants prompted a federal listing for the plant. With that protected status came the idea of re-establishing seablite around San Francisco Bay, where waves and currents had created new beaches. In 1999, seedlings from Morro Bay were transplanted to Crissy Field in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and to Heron's Head Park at Pier 98. The Crissy Field plants were drowned by high water, but success at Pier 98 encouraged further pilot projects.

Seeds collected at Pier 98 were used to establish a second San Francisco colony at Pier 94 in 2006. In the next two years, transplants were introduced to Eastshore State Park land north of Oakland and Roberts Landing near San Leandro, with mixed results.

"Pier 94 is underlaid with urban rubble fill that restricts the depth of taproots," wrote Baye. "The East Bay sites are deep sand and mud, and seablite is doing best on the lower, muddier sand sites with lots of tidal litter."

The draft recovery plan for California seablite and the other marsh species includes goals to be met before the plant can be moved from the endangered to the threatened category, or removed from the endangered species list entirely. For San Francisco, three or more viable populations on public or otherwise protected land would move it into the threatened category; five or more populations that had survived for 10 generations would take it off the list. Morro Bay has its own set of benchmarks.

The new colonies around San Francisco Bay are still at risk from encroachment by nonnative ice plant and cordgrass - another case where restoration needs the gardener's hands. So far, though, results are encouraging. It's good to have this small piece of the bayshore's living mosaic back again.